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PEAKERS: Martina Berardo.
DATE AND TIME: 27/06/2025 11.00h.
PLACE: Interdisciplinary Hub for Research and Innovation (Edificio C - Sala C1.15) Rambla del Poblenou, 154 08018 Barcelona, Spain.The research group Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory  TURBA Lab is pleased to invite you to the Seminar ‘Public space on the agenda: circulation of ideas and urban policies in Buenos Aires (Argentina)’ by Martina Berardo, Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and MSCA Staff Exchange - NOMADIC Project. 
Since the 1980s, the global metropolitan context has been characterised by the prominence of public space in urban policy through urban regeneration strategies that have been developed to the detriment of housing and social facilities. This phenomenon arose in the context of criticism of functionalist urbanism and its way of organising the geography of capital in the Fordist context, which led to processes of degradation, privatisation or reduction of public space to a mere place of passage.

With the transition to the neoliberal accumulation regime, ideas that promote the replacement of traditional urban planning by strategic planning appear on the urban agenda: a territorial intervention tool for the implementation of fragmented operations on portions of the city in order to valorise public spaces, as are considered a strategic resource for competition between cities in the global economy.

The ideas of strategic planning and the Barcelona Model circulated intensively in Latin America during the 1990s and 2000s, encouraging renovation processes in the historic centres of the main metropolises in order to make them more profitable. In the case of Buenos Aires, the refunctionalisation of the old Puerto Madero and the requalification of its historic centre (San Telmo) stand out.

In the 21st century, strategic planning began to coexist in the global urban agenda with human-scale planning, which sustains the virtuous relationship between renovation of public space and economic development, but incorporates a concern for mobility, walkability and usability of public spaces. In parallel to this movement in the global urban agenda, the Government of the City of Buenos Aires implemented the humanisation of public space: an urban policy aimed at beautifying and refunctionalising the city's public spaces.

This seminar proposes a journey through the emergence and evolution of the notion of public space and its crystallisation in the global urban agenda through the circulation of ideas and expert knowledge among multilateral agencies, international consultants, public officials, entrepreneurs, academics and international events; as well as through the process of adoption and adaptation of these ideas in Buenos Aires through the humanisation of public space implemented during 2007-2019. To this end, a theoretical and methodological approach is proposed: the actually existing public space, which far from assuming the pure and linear imposition of ideas related to public space seeks to analyse their concrete application in the metropolis in a situated way, in interaction/tension with pre-existing institutional frameworks, policies, conflicts, imaginaries and practices.





                                           










This project has received funding from the HORIZON-MSCA-2023-SE-01-01 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101183165